It’s Day 2 and the big names are starting to pop up all around Lions. Last night, Kerry Washington took in a performance from Miguel at the Hulu and Spotify bash. Tonight Jon Bon Jovi performs at the MediaLink dinner. Thandie Newton, Ellen Pompeo and Susan Wojcicki took the Lumiere stage today inside the Palais while Akon took part in beachside panel. Look out for a performance from The Killers and will.i.am tonight on the Croisette, or just come and spill into the street with the rest of the fest at Gutter Bar. It’s where everyone ends up anyway.

QUICK TAKES FROM CANNES:

IBM Evangelist Nancy Kramer was in Cannes to discuss AI’s Impact on experience today and tomorrow. Kramer said CEOs and CMOs believe that the future is in customer experience innovation. “We believe that in the future every decision will be informed by a cognitive system of some sort and our lives will be better for it,” she said. With only 20% of the world’s data available to search right now, the environment is ripe for huge leaps in artificial intelligence. IBM recently did a study that looked at 4000 global consumers and 172 brands. “There is a human need to belong,” Kramer said of their discoveries. “People want to feel helped and understood, empowered and inspired.” One example: The Fox Sports app will be able to assemble an entire highlight reel for you, like a 30-minute broadcast, based on your viewing habits.

Mediaocean and IBM iX announced the launch of a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain, bringing together some of the world’s largest advertisers, agencies and publishers, including Kellogg, Kimberly-Clark, Pfizer, Unilever and IBM Watson Advertising. Powered by the IBM Blockchain platform, the solution will tackle supply chain opacity from the rapid proliferation of intermediaries. “We must innovate our approach to the market by looking for new technologies like blockchain to help solve complex business challenges,” said Mukund Kaushik, VP Digital Capabilities and Innovation for Kimberly-Clark. “In this partnership with IBM and Mediaocean, as well as other leaders in the media industry, we are on an exciting journey to use blockchain to solve the challenges of media spend transparency and assurance.”

Heard from YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki: “The numbers are very clear. Users are going digital. And so brands are also going digital. And that is an incredible opportunity to for us to enable new connection, to reinvent advertising, and to think of new levels of engagement. Wojcicki also addressed the controversy of offensive content created by Neo-Nazis and Isis supporters recently found on the platform, which in April made them lose 5% of their top advertisers. “There’s no playbook on how to have content and policies for the scale that we operate,” said Wojcicki. “The way that I think about it is it’s very important that when we look back at this event, when we look back at this time in history that we are on the right side of history.”

Publicis Groupe Chairman-CEO Arthur Sadoun explained his self-imposed ban from the festival – during the festival – as he “unofficially” showcased his company’s AI-based productivity platform, Marcel. “[Marcel] was expensive and we needed the money,” said Sadoun. “We needed the focus. We have hundreds of people working around the world to make this work….We need to be bolder and we need to make sure we take risks.”

In a panel called “What’s coming next in branded consumer experience?” Tim Kobe, Founder CEO of Eight Inc., drew upon his 30 years of designing “experience” to talk about how you can quantify return on experience. “Human outcome leads to business outcome,” said Kobe. “That’s something accountants can quantify.” What matters most to people is that a product makes their life better. “It’s important to understand what is meaningful to people,” says Kobe. He pointed out that no one remembers how many gigabytes the first iPod had nor its dimensions. “Everyone remembers ‘1000 songs in your pocket.’”

In the Diversity panel, actress Thandie Newton brought up that not only is she the first woman of color to be prominently featured in a Star Wars film, as a result of Time’s Up she now benefits from HBO’s decision to compensate their male and female actors equally. “They’re pressured into it, sure, but we need pressure,” she said. Antonio Lucio, the CMO of HP, described how big strides can be made over a short period. In the past two years, HP increased their leadership team from 20% to 50% women. On the agency side, where there were previously zero female heads of creative and strategy, they have increased the number to 52% in 12 months. On the production side, where when they started no projects done by female directors, 59 were shot by female directors. As a result the brand preference score around the globe has grown by 26% and revenue per impression has grown by 33%. “Diversity works,” said Lucio. “Diversity moves the business needle.” But change is not happening fast enough, according to Tiffany R. Warren, Senior Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer, Omnicom Group, who pointed out the number of African American men in the ad industry is under 2%. “Improvements are being made, but I think I’m going to be employed for a very long time,” she said. “As great as it is to [promote] the first, I want to promote the many.”

Richard Edelman, President and CEO of Edelman, unveiled some disconcerting facts from Edelman’s Trust Barometer, telling the audience at the Lumiere that we are currently in a battle for truth. “More than half of the people in the world rely on social media for their news and we’re failing them,” he said at a panel called Fame or Fail? Promoting, Protecting and Entertaining in Untrusted Times. “There’s a sense now that the platforms can’t reform themselves. We’re at levels now, with trust in social media at 20%. We’ve never seen numbers this low before.” The problem, he says, is a polluted ecosystem: “People are deeply upset about things that marketers have taken for granted – cookies, location-based marketing, loyalty programs. The problems of the social media have now metastasized into a broader marketing environment.” His message to brands? “You are absolutely in the middle of an unprecedented politicized moment where the two sides are not speaking to each other, and we’re all having to decide what are our values,” says Edelman. “Where do we stand and what is the truth?”

Grey’s Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo discussed aligning herself with brands as a spokesperson. “You have to choose very carefully, because what you endorse and what you support might contradict,” she said. “It’s challenging but you have to look at the pros and cons of everything. There is no perfect situation” As far as who holds the power, “

Brands have more power than they may believe,” said Pompeo. “Every moment is an opportunity for change. If the brands adopt that and act with certainty and have a moral spine and follow that up with conduct that is also moral and courageous, and are not afraid to speak up for what they believe in, people will follow.”

A CYNOPSIS MESSAGE FROM CADENT

Cannes-worthy creative should be seen on premier networks, during the best programs.

In January of 2018, YouTube veteran Kathryn Friedrich became the Chief Business Officer of RYOT Studio, heading up Oath’s in-house creative studio and building its creative storytelling and distribution capabilities for advertisers. We caught up with Friedrich about the future of data-based advertising and the role RYOT plays in it.

How has Cannes Lions changed in the past five years?

It has changed quite a bit, I think. Five years ago, it was much more focused on creatives. And I think now, there’s this new surge of media, marketing, tech. Not that creative still isn’t here, but I think the other side has really come up. Now it’s that combination of the art and the science. And I love where it’s going as a result.

What have you heard that’s got you excited?

I think everybody is actually pretty excited about the direction of the industry. We are right now at this pivotal moment where we’re trying to figure out what the next thing is. Everybody’s talking about the tech developments, but I think it goes beyond that, because we’ve been doing AR for a little while now. We’ve been doing VR. So, instead of just focusing on those two formats, I think people are starting to think, what’s next?

So, what’s next?

I think it is going into a non-interruption-based marketing. Which is not taking people away from something they’re doing to disrupt them with an ad. That’s annoying. I think there’s a stat that says 87% of people find that kind of advertising intrusive. So, with all the data that we have to show that people find it intrusive, and four out of five people, when they get those messages, are also multitasking through them, you’ve got to think differently about the content marketing side of the business. You have to give them something that they enjoy.

What’s a concrete example of what that looks like to you?

I think brands that are leaning into their value sets really resonate. Take Unilever, for instance. They’re recognizing that there’s a whole sustainability movement, and that the next generation, and even our generation, are really concerned about recycling and the earth, and sustainable future for the next generation.

What part do you play?

Our job is to listen. Our job is to do our homework. And our job is to look at the white space on content and where the demand is for content and try to marry all of those things. It’s almost like putting a puzzle together. With Oath and with the integration now that we have, where RYOT is fully a part of Oath’s ecosystem, we have access to so much data. What most people think about when they think of data is audience data. And what we also have is a tool called the content moments segmentation tool, and we can identify eight different reasons why people are actually consuming content. So, it’s not just what they’re consuming, it’s why they’re consuming it.

There’s so much more on tap. Wednesday features panels about how blockchain has the potential to change advertising forever, how brands can benefit from giving entertainers final cut, a panel on the NBC Olympics and driving cultural conversation through breakthrough TV. Stay tuned!

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